Contexts -- Myths -- Prometheus

Prometheus, a figure from Greek mythology.

Prometheus -- his Greek name means forethought -- was a
Titan who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity,
initiating all the arts of human civilization but angering the Gods,
especially Zeus. In various versions of the myth, Prometheus was
also held to have been the creator of humankind, molding human
beings from clay, and guarding humanity against the angry Gods.
Another thread, and this one clearly represented in Percy Bysshe Shelley's drama, Prometheus Unbound,
is that the Titans and Gods were equally matched in their
internecine war until Prometheus struck a deal with Zeus to
throw his power on the side of the Gods in return for a
pledge that Zeus would free humankind from servitude. After Zeus won, he
reneged on his promise and chained Prometheus, along with the
other Titans, for perpetuity.

For his actions, however they are construed, Prometheus was severely punished by
Zeus. In the version related by Aeschylus
in Prometheus Bound, the most influential account from classical
antiquity, Zeus chained Prometheus to Mount Caucasus and set upon him an eagle
(in other versions a vulture) who each day ate away at his liver which
would be regenerated by night.

Mary Shelley was well aware of these mythic archetypes.
Growing up in the Godwin
household, she would have known, and probably also have been
educated upon, The Pantheon, or, Ancient History of the Gods of Greece
and Rome (1806) by "Edward
Baldwin," the pseudonym under which Godwin wrote books for
children. This was a handbook on classical mythology with a
section devoted to
various versions of the Prometheus myth. She was also aware
of the two main threads of the Prometheus legend, Prometheus
as bearer of fire and as creator of humankind, since they are
both registered in the early
lines of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which her reading list notes her
perusing in 1815.

Mary Shelley was not the first to invoke a "modern
Prometheus." The Earl of Shaftesbury mentions
Prometheus three times in The Moralists (1709)
including a reference to "our modern PROMETHEUS's, the
Mountebanks, who perform'd such Wonders of many kinds,
here on our earthly Stages."